Mindset Archives - Page 5 of 26 - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Jodi, welcome.

Jodi Wellman
Thank you for having me here. I’m excited.

Pete Mockaitis
I am excited, too. I understand you say you’ll have about 1,822-ish Mondays left of your plans here.

Jodi Wellman
Well, I got to tell you, that number’s down by two weeks since you read that. So, I’m down to 1,820, but this clock is ticking down, and, yeah, big plans. I mean, that’s the point, right? It’s like, when we get a little bit granular with that math, that fabulous mortality math, it does make me and many others go, “Wait a sec, how am I going to spend that diminishing time?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, what are some of these big plans?

Jodi Wellman
Well, they’re usually bucketed. It’s funny you ask that because, in terms of research and then the way that I look at my life, they’re in categories. So, there are different domains of life. There’s the fun and recreation side of things, which can further categorize into travel. So going to the south of France in the fall, that’ll be exciting. And so, there’s a whole category around recreation. What are we doing with our leisure time?

And so, looking at starting new hobbies, I’m going to be getting more into trying to learn a new language. And so, really, I’m looking to either refine French or Italian. So that’s just one category, and so that’s a good start, I think, lest I bore you with the gory details.

Pete Mockaitis
No, I appreciate that, that’s fun. That’s fun. Well, lay it on us, you’ve been researching our mortality. Your book, You Only Die Once, a compelling title. Any particularly surprising or fascinating discoveries you’ve made about us humans and our lives, our mortality, that professionals need to know?

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, I definitely think so. So, we all know in the work we do, for example, that, oh, there’s nothing better than the power of a deadline. It’s like we will tend to procrastinate until we know that the strategy session is coming up on the 17th or we’ve got a big project due at the end of the quarter, etc. And it’s so true with our lives.

So having this distinct and, okay, fine, maybe a little bit morbid sense that we are finite is precisely the thing, by having that deadline that does kick us into gear to get on with, I say, the business of living. So, it could be the things we do at work, all of the initiatives we might just keep postponing, but also the things we do outside of work, all the joys and things we might do, again, for recreation, socially, etc., that make us more well-rounded when we come back into work.

So, the research is called Temporal Scarcity, and it’s this idea that whenever we have an asset, okay, like life, that we become heightened, frightenedly aware that it is temporary or rare. Our perception of its value goes through the roof. So that is why I get us to count our Mondays, and that is the heft in terms of empirical evidence behind how we do need to have, unfortunately, that rankling feeling of, “Ugh, scarcity” in order to take action and have that deadline, or else we’ll just float along the lazy river of life and have good intentions, maybe, but not really take as much action on them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, a deadline is quite literally here, there will be a day in which we die, a deadline.

Jodi Wellman
You caught it.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, morbid, yeah, I mean, that’s how some people could react to it, but you seem to have a very different emotional energy vibe association to this. Tell us about it.

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, I definitely do. I mean, I’ve never been super scared of it. I recognize, and in doing research, of course, and working with groups and individuals that some people would much rather not talk about death than anything. Many people would rather public speak. We’re very afraid of dying in the discussion.

So, my openness to it and my mission in life, really, is to de-fang it, make it something that’s like, “Yeah, it sucks. Yeah, definitely. Nobody wants to think about the fact that we’re not going to be around much longer,” relatively speaking. And so, how do we use that and take a more amusing approach to accepting, “Yeah, it sucks to be us,” and yet let’s use it pretty darn quickly to move over to the life side?

So, I talk about the Grim Reaper. I love it. I love the whole topic of mortality because I know it’s a tool. It catapults us not to keep talking about death but to talk about life. So, I make the switch pretty darn quickly. It helps that I doodle, you know, the Grim Reaper and tombstones. It helps to lighten it a little bit, and I tend to give out the most ridiculous, hilarious prizes in my workshops, again, to create levity.

But it’s like a fact of life that we do a fabulous job of denying and deferring and avoiding, and I just say, “Guys, let’s just accept it. Let’s talk about it for a minute. Let’s do the math, let’s do the thinking, and then use a table. I’m curious, like, how does that motivate you to maybe spend your time differently because there’s so much power there?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so maybe could you give us an example of how a person walked through the math, they took a look at it, and then that transformed the way they approached their work, and their life, what they’re up to?

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, I give so many examples in the book, and I do that because we do like to hear and learn vicariously through other people, right? So, there’s one leader I worked with who used to do, in the nature of his business, he acquired companies. And when he stopped and counted, not just his Mondays left in life, but his. Mondays left in his career, he didn’t really have formal retirement plans, but he had a sense about, “By this age, I want to be able to say no and say no a lot, unless it’s a really cool project.”

So, he did the math and he looked and said, “Okay, I do however many acquisitions, mergers per year.” And he did that and worked backwards and said, “Wait a sec. Like, I’ve been thinking, deluding myself,” because that’s what we do. I mean, this is what psychology is. We just try to fool ourselves into happiness. You know, we got to cope somehow.

And so, he was thinking, he knew he wasn’t going to live forever or work forever, but when he did the math and he realized, he really had five good deals ahead of him, like really good juicy ones that he loved to live for, it put everything else in perspective. And it helped him focus in on the kind of work he wanted to do, the kind of deals he wanted to negotiate, the kind of team he wanted along the way, because he was just dilly-dallying and having people around him that weren’t necessarily the lifers, as he now called them.

And so, it helped him prioritize, “What kind of work do I want to do? What kind of work do I not want to do?” because we all know sometimes that’s where the meat on the bone is. So, it can really help sharpen what our priorities are just by way of one example.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, then for our math, can you walk us through it? How might we compute that? Do I need to whip out an actuarial table? Or, what’s the sequence by which I arrive at my Mondays left?

Jodi Wellman
Right. It’s a lot easier than you think. Now, the good news is I have a page on my website called Resources that does the math for you, if you don’t want to waste your precious time in life doing math, but it’s pretty easy. So, if you identify as male, start with 78 years, that’s the average life expectancy, and then you minus your age, and then you multiply by 52 just to keep it easy.

Now, if you are a little more fortunate to have been born a female and you identify as such, then your average age is 83, and then you minus your current age and you multiply it by 52 weeks a year. And then if you don’t identify with either, just average it at 80 and minus your age, and again multiply it by 52. And I think you could probably add in a few Mondays just because you listen to How to Be Awesome at Your Job. I mean, I do think that that should buy you…

Pete Mockaitis
Life extender.

Jodi Wellman
It is. It is, at least a couple weeks, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Life giving. Okay. And so, then when you see that number, it’s like, “Well, shucks, here we are, we’re maybe 1,000-ish, 2,000-ish,” and then it’s even more real when we get precise like 1,822, like you had there. And so, you see that. And then what’s most people’s reaction to beholding this figure?

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, it is usually a bit eye-opening, like, literally, eyes-widening, like, “Oh,” because we are used to the language of years. We’ve already rationalized, “Yeah, I’m going to live to about 80. My grandma lived to 90. Oh, shoot, but my Uncle Reg died at 71,” and you average it out somewhere. But when we talk about the weeks, and I’m super nerdy because that’s why I call my company 4,000 Mondays.

When you even think of it in terms of Mondays, which have a very different feeling than a Friday, you know, Fridays are slam dunks, like, life is easy. But when you think about it with a Monday, and you quantify and say, “Am I really doing the stuff that lights me up if I’m going to be waking up for just that many more Mondays?” that’s where it creates the eye-opening and wakeup call that I’m looking for people.

So, it does tend to create enough discomfort. I’m not afraid of a discomfort. I want people to feel just enough of the poke in the ribs to feel like, “Oh, I got to get on with this.” And this is the thing, Pete, and you know this from all the work you do and the research you do, and with me with my positive psychology background, I would love the idea that we could all just be motivated enough by the pursuit of something awesome. You know, the, “Oh, I want to live this kind of life and I’m going to go for it.”

And some people are intrinsically motivated enough to do that, but the rest of us, we need a prod, we need a nudge, we need something that is, unfortunately, just a tad negative, which is why I talk about scarcity rather than abundance in this context. And so, that is the eye-opener for people that we think, “Oh, I didn’t want to see it that way, but now that I see it and I hopefully can’t unsee it. What does it motivate me to do?”

And that’s where the conversation gets good. It’s like, “So now what? This precious life. This dwindling, diminishing existence you have. What do you want to…?” Throw that in. I mean, you’ve got to heighten the drama, “But what do you want to stuff it with?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Jodi, it’s funny. This might be the most intense episode of “How to Be Awesome at Your Job” ever. It’s like, quite literally, life and death is all we’re talking about. But what you say really does connect. A friend of mine shared with me he had some family members with some health challenges. One was a child of his, which was very scary. And another was his mother, and he said, “Boy, just experiencing that really kind of made me think about what I want to be doing with my career, instead of like postponing my dreams.”

And so, he just like went for it, he’s like, “I’ve always had this cool business idea, and so I’ve got some people together. We made a pitch deck and we approached an investor. And then he’s in for a couple hundred thousand dollars or a few hundred thousand dollars for a few points of equity.” So, he’s got like a multi-million-dollar evaluation. It was like, “I just talked to you like a month ago. What is going on here? It’s amazing.”

And so, I’m proud and impressed and, just like that, I mean, he had the idea bouncing around his head for a long time, and then a few scary situations with family members’ health, the guy was, “You know what, let’s just see what happens. Let’s just go for it.” And then, wow, he’s off to the races.

Jodi Wellman
Oh, this story is profound, and I love it. This is the research that I do that just lights me up beyond belief that I hope to also shine that light on others. This is the wakeup call with this gentleman. And it takes a really unfortunate situation to see that light. Especially, because I talk a lot about the wakeup calls we receive personally. Like, if you get a health diagnosis that ain’t so hot, that usually tends to snap us to attention, and we want to live differently, and research is so clear.

I always love this phrase that psychologists, existential psychologists use, that when people have had a brush with death, they experience what’s called a roar of awakening. It feels so visceral, right? And so, whether it’s our own precipice moment with the great beyond, or whether it is because a family member or a dear friend, or we’ve had some very salient moment to realize, “Oh, gosh, like, we are mortal,” that can be the thing that catapults us.

And, ultimately, what it comes down to, and I think you even embedded the words in your anecdote, it’s like, “What are we waiting for?” We delude ourselves into thinking that we’re going to have time later, and I am getting to get all hot and bothered here, but we need to talk about it because I think we believe we’re going to have time to do the new initiative, or open up the New York office, or do the cool thing, or open up the spinoff business, or go to Prague, “We’re just going to get to do it later.”

It’s either in this category of when work dies down, we’ll, like, let’s all get laughed together at that notion, because we’re working hard at making work more productive and busier often, which is not about dying things down, another metaphor about dying things down. And so, we’re either waiting for that, lull, “Well, it ain’t going to happen,” or we’re waiting for retirement, which to me is like, “Don’t you dare.”

Yeah, plan a cool retirement, do that, too. But if you are deferring your existence for a later that just may not arrive, oh, honey buddy, I just want to take you, in somewhere between a hug and a throttle, it’s just like, “What are we waiting for? Don’t wait for your kid to get sick. Don’t wait for you to get thankfully in remission from a cancer that you just were trying not to think about. Don’t wait to get to retirement when, all of a sudden, your gout is so bad that you can’t even climb the Spanish steps that you’ve been longing to climb since you were in your early thirties that you just put off.” See, I’m getting all worked up, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
No, I hear you. Well, it’s heavy and it’s intense. And, in some ways, you’ve got something novel on your hands, like the math and the number of Mondays and whatnot. In another way, this is a very ancient wisdom concept, you know, memento mori. I think that’s Latin. I was a Latin student. That just means remember your death. Is that correct?

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, remember you’re going to die. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Remember your death. And so, I know Ryan Holiday has done a fine job of, I think, he’s got a cool coin as well that says that on it. I think there’s a skull or something. Cool stuff from Ryan Holiday. So, tell us, what’s sort of like the ancient wisdom on meditating upon this? And what’s your new fresh stuff that you’re bringing to the table?

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, it’s all rooted in the ideology that some call it stoicism as a philosophical endeavor. Philosophers, depending on their camps, for centuries have been extolling the virtues of remembering that you’re going to die, and in some cases, it was so that they could control the population for ways of being virtuous or for religious means. But being in tune with the end is not a new idea.

Just like with most of us, we all rationally know we have an expiry day. We don’t know when it is, but we all understand it. But it’s the reminder that we need to keep in mind and keep fresh. So, in more modern times, I referred a moment ago to some existential psychologists, and there’s a whole new branch of psychology called existential psychology, and it really is the study of our experience of not just the positive psychology side, which is a lot of my background around like what it takes to live the good life, but it’s also the nuances of how we will defer and avoid and deny, and what the cost is of that.

So, the more modern take on it is let’s just try to be open and honest with ourselves about it, and have conversations with our families, and our friends, and just like, for me, it’s like that’s the best happy hour ever. It’s just talking about a bucket list and holding each other accountable about, “What are you going to do?” “Did you book the trip?” “Did you book the online course?” “Did you set up the LLC like you said you wanted to do?” Because again, what are we waiting for?

So, it’s all rooted in the ancient times. And in the modern times, I think there’s not really a lot more we can do other than create a habit around talking about it and thinking about it and remembering it. So, this doesn’t just become a, “Huh, interesting conversation I listened to on your podcast that floats away.” We have to embed it into our routines, if you will, and that’s the stuff that helps make it stickier.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you give us another example? So, we’ve heard about a couple folks in the deal-making or entrepreneurial zone. Any other dramatic wakeups that you’ve witnessed?

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, there was a woman I worked with three years ago, she was in her early 40s, and she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and she ran her own company and it was an eye-opener for her. She beat it, and that was fantastic, and that had inspired her to come alive and start a foundation as part of her organization.

So, a lot of what this does is it instills this idea about like legacy thinking, which is really important I think for leaders, but not even just for leaders but people thinking about, “How am I showing up at work? And how am I showing up at life? Like, how do I want to be remembered?” So, for this woman, Christia, she felt really compelled as a result of having her life threatened in front of her, to say, “I want to start raising money for women with breast cancer who didn’t have access to some of the means that I had.”

Because she knew coming from the south side of Chicago, that she had a history where she knew other people were suffering in ways that her financial means were allowed her better access to some care and convenience. So, now the truth is, if I was just to fast-forward to take this to a different direction, but on purpose, is that she was re-diagnosed and, unfortunately, a couple of years ago she did pass away, and she was 42 when she died.

And I still work with the company, the fabulous team there that inherited the business from her. Her sister and her niece are running that company. They’re called Thank God It’s Natural, and they are phenomenal. But for Christia, it opened her eyes up to “What kind of business do I want to run? Where do I want to prioritize our operations? And where do I want to not focus?”

So, another woman, here in Palm Springs, where I’m currently based, also had a breast cancer experience for herself. She started a nonprofit that helps survivors. And the way she worded it is that, “I was given a second chance at life.” And she said that in her experience of sitting and doing something like 24 rounds of chemotherapy, I wrote about this as an example in the book and drew a doodle about it, I called it Shay’s Circle because she said, “I took a fresh journal page and I drew a big circle.”

“And I said to myself, ‘I’m making it through this cancer situation, but I’m going to be very thoughtful about the life I’m going to live moving forward, this second chance I’ve been given. What do I want and who do I want in my life?’” And she was very deliberate and wrote names of people, some of the priorities with her work, activities she wanted to focus on, things with her kids in the circle, and she was very thoughtful about, “And I will no longer…” and she had a couple names, and she had a couple of tendencies, like pleasing tendencies, saying yes to being on committees and all the things that we just do because we’re not conscious that our life is finite.

So those are extremes, people having had scares that did, unfortunately, take them, but also scares that did, I think, we learned from that. Like, my goal is for us to have wakeup calls without having to go through any of that drama of having a near-death experience because there’s so much gold from people who have been there or have been close. So, we can refine our priorities. I think that’s one of the biggest opportunities, in addition to being grateful for life. But we’re refining our priorities and the big businesses we work in and things we do, sometimes that’s key.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m fascinated as I just imagine the listeners hearing this, like, some people have already turned off this podcast and have asked out their dream guy, their dream partner or send an email to be like, “Let’s talk about this business that we’ve been picking around.” They’ve already taken the action. They’re so fired up. They’re inspired, like, you’re transforming them. Boom. Already done.

I think there’s others, and I’m finding myself in this boat a little bit right now. It’s like, well, you know, Jodi, I mean, I guess I’ve been quite blessed. I mean, in many ways, I’ve had a lot of dreams, and then I have realized them. It’s like, I’ve got a family, and they’re amazing. I’ve got a dream job, and then I got a job that was better than that dream job, and then I got a job that was better than that, better than that dream job. It’s like, I’m talking to fascinating people whose books I would just read, and this is turning into income, and then other entrepreneurial things are turning into income, and I’m working with cool people I like.

In a way, it’s like I don’t feel like I’ve postponed anything major, and yet I have a feeling there’s more for me here because I don’t, frankly, spend much time thinking, “Oh, I’m going to die soon.” I don’t do that. And as you’re saying it, it feels heavy and intense, like, “Yeah, whoa, for real, a limited number of Mondays. Okay.” But I’m not yet electrified to charge in any given direction. I was like, “Huh, these are pretty good. I guess I should just keep doing that.” What about this segment?

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, I love what you’re saying. So, I have quadrants like any good empirically based situation has quadrants, and so you are in…

Pete Mockaitis
As a former consultant, absolutely, they do.

Jodi Wellman
I know, exactly. You got the Bain in you, right? So, you’ve got widening your life with vitality is one dimension, and that’s literally the idea about, “How can I add more fun and interest and experience and cool stuff and pleasure and happiness?” Okay, so for many people who have really busy profound jobs, this is the dimension and, in fact, this actually is where most people in my research will identify as.

They’ll say, “I’ve got enough meaning in my life but I need more of this widening vitality. I need more fun. I feel like I’m not going out as much as I used to do the fun things in the restaurants, or going to a concert, or trying that new printmaking class, or the things that might feel kind of cool and make me feel more alive in a different way, rather than maybe the more one-dimensional existence I’ve been living, which is like rocking my business.” So that’s just one axis is widening your life with vitality.

The other one is deepening your life with meaning, and that is that sense of having a purpose, being connected to people, maybe something bigger than you, like in the spiritual realm. It’s defined as kind of doing good, as opposed to just feeling good. And so, when you mash these together, you’ve got four quadrants.

Pete, you are in what I call the astonishingly alive category, which I know, it’s a big word. I know, but here’s the deal, because why this is, is that you are, you seem to be, you’re living a good life where you’re plus, anywhere positive, even if it’s 0.10 on meaning, and plus on vitality, and so you’re in a good place. There are a lot of people out there, a majority, because, by the way, my research is clear, like 11% of people identify in the astonishingly alive category currently.

And so, most people are in that zone of like, “My job’s meaningful,” or, “Rearing my kids is meaningful, but I’m so freaking bored.” Or, it could be the reverse, which is, “I am having fun. Like, I’m out there. I am traveling. I’m on the yacht, but I go home and I feel like I’m an empty hollow shell. Like, what am I doing this for?” So, there are variations on those themes, but I don’t want to say now that there’s no fun for you, that you can’t do more with this.

Pete Mockaitis
“You’re done.”

Jodi Wellman
No, exactly. Cash in your chips. No, because here’s why. This is why you do this podcast. You’re in a good situation, you’re living life, and yet you are yearning to learn more. You want more. So, nobody I know who’s in the astonishingly alive category is just content to put your feet up and be like, “We are done here.” You want more, and so that is where I do think some of these exercises can be useful.

So, for you, counting your Mondays may not be resonant in a way that you’re like, “No, but I’ve done cool things.” That’s what we’re looking to get to, is that feeling like, “I killed it.” Like, if you got to the end, you’d be able to say…

Pete Mockaitis
So much depth, Jodi. Like, “You’re just going to die.”

Jodi Wellman
That’s where you’re at, like, “Okay, fine. I nailed it. Like, I lived this life. I extracted it. I did it.” You might be able to say that now, and yet, there are also things where if you did play the game with me about the deathbed regrets, or if you knew you had 18 months to live, what would be things that you would, all of a sudden, think, “Oh, I want to do that”?

Those are all just cues and clues to either yearnings or inklings that you might want to get moving on now, and I call them pre-grets. I know it’s super cheesy, but, like, if you identify a regret, you might be like, “Oh, man, I always wish that I had volunteered at that library,” or “I always wish that I had gotten back to playing the violin,” or fill in the blanks. There’s no shortage of examples.

That’s an example of like, “Hey, the good news is, last I checked, you still have a pulse, and if you really want to pick up the violin again, like, dude, it’s yours to pick up!” And then you just get to be the one to decide, like, “Eh, it was a passing fancy, no big deal. My life is great without doing that,” or, “Yeah, you know, I would feel proud of myself if I actually did pick that up,” or go and read to kids from 4: 00 till 5:00, Tuesday evenings, whatever it is. Those are opportunities, I think, to just add even more astonishment to your astonishingly alive life.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool. And I like that notion a lot in terms of with the two axes. I’m thinking of a buddy he’s doing a lot of cool things. Like, yeah, he’s into drumming in a band. He’s brewing beer, and going to beer-tasting events, and like golfing and improving his golf. And then his mom said, this is like a very mother thing to say, she’s like, “Oh, you know, all those hobbies aren’t really a vocation.” He’s like, “Oh, that’s heavy, vocation.”

But, yeah, that sort of speaks to meaning, and there’s some truth to that, like all the fun and games with these activities can leave you feeling hollow and/or you might say, “No, I’ve got the dream family, but, oh, my gosh, when do I get to get out of this home and just be wacky”?

Yeah, so two dimensions, you can widen, have more fun widening your vitality, but you might feel hollow, or you can be super fulfilled, but, “Ooh, where’s the fun?” And that does remind me, yeah, I guess the things that are sort of left undone, I mean, some of them I’m just sort of pursuing, like, wouldn’t it be kind of cool to be lighter and stronger at 41 than I was at 21? Well, I’m on my path. I think we’re getting there and it’s sort of exciting to feel the progress from like a fitness perspective.

But then there’s also things that just sort of got left by the wayside, like, you know I always thought it would be cool to learn how to sing, and I’ve never really done that very well. Or, I’ve always been mystified by when I go bowling, which is rare, like one throw of the ball is a strike, the next is a gutter ball, and I don’t think I did anything different. Like, what’s behind that?

Like, I thought it would be fun to spend a day with a bowling coach for no reason, just to solve this plaguing mystery, but, like, though I may only go bowling three times a year for the rest of my life, and it doesn’t matter if I win or lose to me in the least.

Jodi Wellman
Right. This is the cool thing. You are giving examples that I think we, in our rational brains think, “But this isn’t really a thing, is it?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it doesn’t really matter.

Jodi Wellman
And we can call it corny. And that’s one of the things I notice actually in the workshops and work I do, is that people will feel the need to kind of explain away or say, “I don’t even know why I want to do this, but I do,” and it’s like we just have judgments about things. And I’m here to say there’s nothing that is too small or silly.

Because when you look at the span of your life, and remember, I’m the one that gets fanatical about calculating time, usually calculating it backwards, but every single moment of our lives is a little tiny fragment, whether it’s a five-minute or 10-minute, or a bowling excursion, or going out for Thai food, or spending time in a meaningful conversation with a colleague, they’re all just 30 minutes attached to each other.

And so, in our lives, we underestimate that if I was to take, “Hey, what if I did book a bowling guru session?” First of all, that sounds to me like it would be hilarious, and I’m always a big fan of having a good story to tell later. But that could be a thing. It’s a fun thing. Now, this is an example you could probably whip up, and this is what I do in workshops with people.

It’s like, “Get your list going. The things you might come up with first may not make your cut, or you may find it interesting today, and then tomorrow, when you’re seeing the light of day, or you’ve ranked ordered other things, you think all that, “Meh, you know what? I don’t really need to go to the Florida Keys, whatever.”

But at some point, when you have a working list, it gives you the actual solid chance to make choices about your life. Because right now, in the absence of having something that’s concrete, like your list of things that bring you joy, your list of things that would be cool to do, that again I like to organize them on those axes, about fun stuff, deep stuff, vitality, meaning. But now at least you have a menu to choose from about how to design your life.

And life will pass us by. We know this full well. We get to the weekend and, well, first of all, we’re always glad it’s the weekend. But we get through our weeks and they feel like blurs. It’s a very strong signal that we aren’t doing anything that’s unique or different with our time. And in order to even just create the perception of time slowing down so that your 1,822, or however many Mondays you have left, are well spent, it’s about being super conscious and saying, “You know what? I’m going to book that bowling lesson.”

Or, “You know what? I am going to go and plan that road trip that I’ve been talking about for ages.” Or, “I am going to finally schedule that team retreat that I’ve been dreaming about but I just like, am I an all talk no action kind of person? No, I’m going to just book it because it’s on my list, and I’ve said like this is something that I would feel really cool if I did. Would I regret it gravely on my deathbed? Maybe, maybe not.”

But the point is we need to start capturing some of these desires because, otherwise, they will float away and we’ll get focused on the things that are sometimes important, but mostly urgent, Covey style, and the next thing you know, it’s three years later and we’re not any younger. So, this is just really about getting deliberate with what it might take to make a life worth living.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah And, Jodi, I think as folks go through this exercise, they could have moments of inspiration, like, “Yeah, these are all the cool things I’d love to do.” And then disillusionment in terms of, “Oh, but you know, I got to pay the bills, and we got the mortgage, and the kids need these things. And I can’t just abandon my duties and responsibilities.” So, we get excited and then there’s a dose of reality and practicality that’s like, “Wah, wah.” So, how do you deal with those?

Jodi Wellman
How do we deal with that? I am fanatical about making sure that at least, like, do a list of 30 things, 25 at least have to be things that are very doable in a day or a week. So, it needs to be within your resource plan. Like, it can’t be, “Oh, you know what makes me really happy is when I am sailing around the Mediterranean.” Yeah, you and everybody, but that’s not going to be likely. Like, I’m looking for things that are actually very bite-sized on your list. Like, for many people, it’s that they go for a walk on a Saturday morning in the forest preserve.

Like, last I checked that was free. Okay, maybe you have to pay for parking. I don’t know what we’re talking, like five bucks. And sometimes I know busy parents are like, “Dude, when was the last time you had a Saturday morning free?” But I would still challenge you, and say, “Do you have 35 minutes to go and sneak that into your day?”

Identifying things that give you, again, small little bouts of joy. Like, for some people, it’s as simple as, I’m looking right now, of course, at a book. And this comes up a lot when I work with professionals. We read a lot of business books, as we should. They’re amazing. Lots of cool ones. Lots of great self-development books.

And yet, it is a real source of almost guilt but joy about people saying, “I would just love to read a fiction book for a change,” or, “I would love to read a biography, just something kind of mind-expanding.” And that is an example where, what if you read a chapter in the morning over coffee and your piece of peanut butter toast, and you just shook up your routine a little bit?Because we haven’t even talked about novelty, but like having variety in our life is one of the lowest-hanging fruit options out there to shake up our lives, and add just a little bit more, again, of that vitality because we just get into routines. And we’ve been trained by lots of really smart thought leaders that habits and routines are the way. And I’m going to challenge that because I think that it is because we get into the rut, and one of my favorite quotes is by Ellen Glasgow, “The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.”

Like, we will routinize our lives to the point where they’ve lost sort of the flavor. It just becomes, “I know what I do on Tuesday mornings. I go into the office. I nod at Marcy. I get my coffee. I do the report. I have a status update meeting at 2:00 p.m. and then I go home.” Like, the shaking things up even in ways that we will, again, underestimate the value of, like, going outside.

I just heard from somebody that was at a workshop. They decided to go and spend part of their lunch break walking to a little food stall because they were in a bit of a funk, like, “Let me go walk to a food stall, shake it up a little bit.” They got a taco. Again, we’re not talking about big bucks to live a life that feels really cool, and, like, “Oh, interesting. This is like a new area. I’ve never been here. There was a little bit of sunshine. And I got out, and I came back, and I have a new lease on life to attack my afternoon.”

And those are small things where, again, we’re not talking about doing the bucket list about you have to move to Paris, and you have to divorce your deadbeat spouse, and you have to make these massive plans, like change your career and go back to school. If you feel the urge to do those things, don’t not do them. But for most of us, it’s not about the grand sweeping gestures. For most of us, it’s about deliberate little tiny things that we can pepper our days with that will add up to a life that feels more lived than one that just, again, was like a glossed-over, zombie-version of the life that I think we all deep down really want to be living more alive.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Jodi, this is powerful stuff. Tell me, any other do’s and don’ts or things you want to mention before we hear about your favorite things?

Jodi Wellman
Well, definitely, the biggest do of all is do befriend the Grim Reaper. He will take your last breath away in the end, and so I understand the need to keep a distance, but he is absolutely the portal to living like we mean it. So do keep him close by, being aware, count the Mondays. And I’m going to reiterate what I just said. Like, don’t underestimate that small things matter and pick one small thing to take action on. We know this through every business adage we’ve ever found, every to-do, every self-help to-do. It’s like, don’t try and take on the world.

If you can blow your life up and start something. I know a client who said, “I’m leaving my job.” She’s in New Jersey. She’s like, “I quit. I moved down south and I’m opening up an Etsy shop.” That was a lot of life change in an instant, but for her, she needed to make a big signal to herself. But was it like that for most of us?

No. It’s like, what is one thing you can do by the end of this week that is going to make you feel just a little more alive? Is it making a new playlist? You know, is it pulling out the spice drawer and being like, “Oh, my gosh, when was the last time I used garam masala?” Or is it calling your old friend from college and being like, “Dude, we keep talking about getting together. When are we going to…? Okay, October the 9th? Booked.” Like, do a thing that makes you feel like you voted to live. One small thing.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Jodi Wellman
Oh, my gosh. Hunter S. Thompson, “Life should not be a journey to the grave in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, ‘Wow, what a ride!’”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Jodi Wellman
I’m always a fan of the research that reinforces death reflection helps us be more grateful. So not death awareness, which is just seeing a funeral procession go by. That does freak us out. But, actually, stopping and thinking, “Huh, I have this many Mondays left,” being thoughtful. And then what that does is it does make you more grateful for not just the experience of being alive but for the good things in your life. So, death reflection pays off in multitudes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Jodi Wellman
I would say anything by Irv Yalom. Y-A-L-O-M. He’s a psychologist that does really cool work. So, Staring at the Sun is a really good example. And it’s this idea about being willing to contemplate mortality.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And a favorite tool?

Jodi Wellman
I’m going to come back to count your Mondays and keep some sort of talisman nearby, they will be your reminder about your fabulous temporariness.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Jodi Wellman
No habit. Remember, habits dull the edges of our existence.

Pete Mockaitis
I love the multiple perspectives here. And a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Jodi Wellman
This idea that sometimes the fear of death is rivaled only by the fear of living.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Jodi Wellman
Thanks for asking. I’m over at FourThousandMondays.com.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, think about your legacy. How do you want to be described when you’re long gone? Not just because you died. Maybe you got promoted. Maybe you got moved to the fancy office in the Southwest. Go do that. How do you want people to think of you when you’re gone? Oh, and, yes, at your funeral. And that is the reverse way to engineer a life that you love and that you are proud to be living.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Jodi, thank you. This has been very, very fun. Jodi, this has been aliveness-boosting. I wish you 1,800 plus joyful Mondays.

Jodi Wellman
I super appreciate it. Thanks for this time well spent.

Pete Mockaitis
Caroline, welcome back.

Caroline Miller
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about Big Goals. And I’m curious, you’ve been around the block, doing a lot of research, positive psychology, and more, what would you say is your most fascinating discovery you’ve made about us humans and goal-setting, goal-achieving?

Caroline Miller
I think my biggest awareness aha moment is that, 20 years after I learned goal-setting theory, the number one ranked management theory of all time of 73 theories, also known as the 800-pound gorilla, everyone sets goals and no one knows this number one theory, and it floors me to this day that it remains one of the most unknown, but most validated theories ever to come out of psychology.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I’m intrigued. So, if there’s 73 theories, how does a theory get to win number one? I’m imagining a reality TV show which the theories are competing against each other with judges and audience input. How does that work?

Caroline Miller
Well, I only report the news, but I do know I have research showing that academics, management theorists, people in the field who actually know what the science is about when you look at self-efficacy theory or different kinds of bias, etc., goal-setting theory is universally ranked number one because of its importance and because everyone does it.

And if we knew the science, which is so amazing that people don’t, if we knew the science, I do believe we’d be more productive, more engaged and more successful. And as a mother, I also feel strongly that our children would grow up with dreams that they have the tools to accomplish, which I don’t think they have. And I think that’s a huge error we’ve made as a society and as parents to not have this science and teach it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m intrigued. Like, what kind of lift might we see in terms of our goal attainment rates, peddling around as we do, ignorant of the science versus utilizing all these best practices?

Caroline Miller
I can’t give you a percentage, but what I can tell you is that most people disengage and become overwhelmed by the size of their goals, the fact that they have a big dream and they don’t know where to start. And so, as the mother of three adult children who grew up being told to tell them they were winners and that, if we did this, they would all grow up confident and happy, and they’d be very hard workers.

What instead we found out, now that this era of self-esteem parenting is over, is that for the most part, they’re fragile and they can’t always take feedback or performance reviews. Now, I’m not being universal, not all are like this, but the findings are pretty robust that this is a generation that doesn’t know how to do hard things and break goals down into small component parts and have mastery experiences. But I also speak for the parents.

I mean, I’ve known this thing for 20 years. I’ve been all over the world. I work with CEOs and leaders and companies big and small, countries big and small, and they all set goals and no one has this science. So, I think, universally, we are underperforming and underachieving. And one of the things in Big Goals that I’m really proud of is I dug into the research that shows that it’s mostly white men who have benefited from these productivity systems that started in the 1880s and do not benefit women and people of other cultures, partly because we weren’t around.

We weren’t in the workplace. This is not how we thought the workplace would be, but it hasn’t evolved, and it’s something that isn’t discussed. It’s time to have this bridge between the 20th century and the 21st, and my book addresses that gap that I’m happy to share more about.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I guess I’d like to understand, if you don’t have a precise percentage, perhaps could you tell a story in terms of a transformation unfolding by utilizing the science?

Caroline Miller
I could tell you a million stories. I worked with one executive, a lot of executives, but I’m thinking of one in particular, a CEO of a major, let’s call it, outdoor remodeling company, who through COVID just kept setting the same performance goals for the salespeople and his senior leadership team, but the entire society turned upside down. We were in, what Locke and Latham would call, a mass learning goal condition where everything you did five, ten years ago can’t be done the same way anymore.

We’ve got a distributed workplace. We’ve got artificial intelligence. We’ve got all kinds of supply chain issues. And so, what he did was he hit pause on all of the goals that he had for himself and for his senior leadership team, and he said, “Caroline Miller’s going to come in and teach us about goal-setting theory, and we’re going to now slow down, and we’re going to take all of these goals and turn them into learning goals because we’re learning new ways to do things.”

The world is different. This is a period not unlike after the Black Death, which gave birth to the Renaissance, which became more evidence-based approaches to medicine and art and science and so on and so forth. So, what he did was he changed the entire goal-setting dashboard within the company. People were able to take the time to learn how to do their jobs in new ways because they had to. They couldn’t meet with customers in person anymore. There were different ways of working with computer systems that people had to learn, let alone artificial intelligence. That’s a whole different conversation.

And as people slowed down, they became more curious and engaged in what they were being asked to do, how the onboarding was done. And as a result, the company hit record profitability in the last few years, and he’s a very satisfied customer. But that’s just very typical of what happens when people learn about Locke and Latham’s goal-setting theory and realize that there are two kinds of goals: performance goals and learning goals, and you can’t mix them up.

And when you do, when you take something that the world has never done before, you’ve never done before, a learning goal, and you skip the time that it takes to gather the skills and the education, the knowledge to do this job, and the time to kind of try out “How do I personalize my approach to this?” what you end up is something called goals gone wild, which is embodied by Boeing’s 737 MAX disasters. The Titan Submersible was stocked in rush.

You can’t skip the learning component when you’re doing something for the first time. When you do, people lose their reputations, companies lose their reputations, and in the case of the Titan Submersible, Boeing, other companies, Ford, the Ford Pinto, people lose their lives. So, it’s a serious issue. It’s a simple theory, but the importance of getting it right cannot be overstated.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so lay it on us, what’s sort of our fundamental misconception? Is it the performance learning stuff?

Caroline Miller

I think the fundamental misconception is that people think SMART goals is science, and it’s not. It was this dude, this manager in 1982, who was going to give a presentation. It was this sticky acronym, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, whatever. I mean, the part of the problem that we’ve discovered with SMART goals, because it’s been studied, is not only does it undermine goal achievement, because if you use the word “realistic” for “R,”what you find is that people undershoot their ability to go after hard goals. And Locke and Latham found that the best possible outcome for all goals is challenging and specific.

So, imagine my arm reached out in front of me, or yours, and the goals that we should be shooting for that always get the best outcomes are past our fingertips. So, when you use “R-realistic,” what you find is that people undermine their ability to find out what they’re made of, and they usually shoot and get very mediocre results. But it’s called “jargon mishmash syndrome,” because “smart” means different things to different people. So, it’s not science. It’s just not science.

So, that’s one of the first things that I would say is that people labor under the conception or the misconception that they know the science of goal-setting, and I think we take it for granted that we have accomplished things in our lives, “And if I did this, I can do that,” when, in fact, the science came out in 1990, and it’s still the most unknown, undelivered piece of research from academia into the mass market, and it stuns me every day.

No matter where I’m talking, no matter who I’m working with, their productivity dashboard in their company or in their lives is based on an urban legend, or vision boards, or law of attraction, or some version of that. And we are not supporting ourselves and the people around us, and our children in particular, in the best possible way if we don’t go out and learn this science.

So, I think it is a crisis of unimaginable proportions because we have a generation that is anxious and depressed and disengaged from the workplace and quite often comes right down, as Gallup said in their State of the Workplace in early 2024, “The number one problem facing all workplaces is a lack of productivity based on faulty goal systems.” We don’t have good goal hygiene. And if we don’t know the science, it’s like trying to put a cornerstone down for a building that’s rocky or isn’t going to hold the weight of the building and everything’s going to crumble.

We have to know the science of goal-setting. This to me is an urgent plea for everyone to stop and say, “It’s time to go in an evidence-based direction,” just like we did during the Renaissance after the Black Death. Everything has to come up a notch and I’ve worked on that. Plus, in the book Big Goals, I introduced something called a BRIDGE methodology that then is the gap between “Here’s goal-setting, theory, here’s the right goal, but how are you going to accomplish it?”

And what I’ve brought to bear is all of this science that no one has heard of from academia, from psychology, from motivation, from mindset research, from grit, to help us understand how to accomplish those goals. And as I said earlier, there’s a gender component that people haven’t paid attention to. Not all approaches to productivity and goal setting fit everyone. You have to personalize it based on who you are and where you are.

Pete Mockaitis
Caroline, are you telling me that if I put my dreams on a vision board and secrete them to the universe, the universe is not going to bring them into my reality?

Caroline Miller
Hmm, let me think about that. No.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, then lay it on us, let’s get these principles associated with the goals theory.

Caroline Miller
Well, what I will say about vision boards is the reason why they hang around so much, I call them these zombie theories, they’re just not dying like SMART goals. They’re dying. They’re hanging around but they won’t go away. There’s some little kernel of something important in vision boards, and that is the science of priming.

When we remind ourselves with pictures or words or aromas, things that enter our conscious and subconscious minds that prime us to act and think in goal-directed ways, we are more likely to accomplish our goals, but that’s a small subset of what must be done. It’s never enough to just have a vision board or to just chant or to write something in lipstick on your mirror.

I think that we’re not taking ourselves seriously if we’re going to just have this one-dimensional approach or magical approach to getting what we want. We can’t skip the hard work piece, that’s just not possible. And you know what, even little kids know that if you give them something that they haven’t worked hard for, they don’t tend to value it. None of us do.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, let’s hear the principles fundamentally. How do we set goals?

Caroline Miller
How do we set goals? So, we start with goal-setting theory, basically, “Do I have a performance goal or a learning goal?” In the book, I call it performance goal with checklist goal. So, this is something you’ve done before that’ll fit on a checklist, and you can actually give that checklist to someone else and they’ll have a shot at accomplishing that goal.

So, what it is, it’s like a hotel maid, it’s like a surgeon going into the operating theater and checking “Do I have all the right instruments or the right people around me?” or a pilot in a pre-flight checklist. Checklists are for things you’ve done before and you don’t want to skip a step. And for that reason, you know that you can set a specific outcome by a specific date. And again, Locke and Latham say challenging and specific. That’s a performance goal/checklist goal.

The other kind of goal is a learning goal. So, you start with that, and you can call it a moonshot goal, meaning you haven’t done it before, and the world hasn’t done it before. And then you have to say, “What is it I need to learn in order to accomplish this goal? Who has that knowledge? Is it on Wikipedia? Is there a YouTube? Is there a book? Is there a podcast? Where am I going to flatten my learning curve?”

So, then you go into this BRIDGE methodology I came up with, the brainstorming. But the brainstorming really ought to start with this one prompt that I keep coming back to, “What’s new? What’s new? What do I not know yet? What’s new in the world that would help me become more efficient and effective in this goal?”

And I’ll just tell you one little story that I’m just transfixed by, and that’s this Herculaneum papyri, how they’ve solved this library of charred scrolls. Julius Caesar’s father-in-law in Herculaneum, when Vesuvius dubious erupted, the biggest, most wonderful library in ancient history was charred and these scrolls became like little pieces of firewood. And for years, hundreds of years, I want to say 400 years, we’ve been trying to unroll them.

Guess what happened? During COVID, the former CEO of GitHub got fascinated and bored by the fact that he’s sitting at home every day and he goes on Wikipedia, and he starts looking up ancient tragedies and catastrophes, and he stumbles on this unsolved thing like, “Oh, my God, what do we know now from Silicon Valley, from high particle accelerators, from artificial intelligence that could help us unroll these scrolls?”

Long story short, they now have unrolled, by using artificial intelligence and beaming lights into these scrolls and virtually unwrapping them, they have started to read these ancient scrolls and it’s going to remake everything we know about religion and art and philosophy. It is just stunning. So, you always start with what’s new.

So, in the book, I talk about why traditional brainstorming approaches don’t work, but I have a long set of prompts I have in the book to help people through brainstorming. Relationships. Relationships mean not just “Who do I need to know and have in my life to accomplish this goal? But who do I need to put a container around and keep them out of my life while I’m accomplishing this goal?” People don’t look at that and that’s critical.

And we know research from Shelly Gable at the University of California Santa Barbara, she found that when you share a big goal, a dream with somebody else, their response has to be curious and enthusiastic. That’s the one signal that says to you, “This person has my back, they’re in my corner, and I can tell them more, and they are going to help me accomplish that goal.” So, “Who should be in my life? And who shouldn’t?” Relationships.

Investments, “How am I going to invest my character strengths in the pursuit of this?” We know from positive psychology that knowing your top five-character strengths and using them, deploying them in new and interesting ways to accomplish your goals, or to interact with people throughout the day, makes you more successful. It also makes you happier and it makes you more authentic.

So, the investments can be time, energy, money, character strengths, but you have to think through, “What am I going to sink into this process that I have to build a budget for, build a time budget for, etc.?” So, BRID decision-making. Oh, my gosh, I love this topic. So, when Danny Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for sunk cost theory and all of his work on how do we value the things that we spend time with, he also did a lot of work on bias.

But at the end of his life, he wrote this brilliant book with two other economists called Noise, and he was saying that the biggest mistakes we make in decision-making is when we don’t do a noise audit of how we’ve made previous decisions, identical decisions, “What are we being impacted by? Did our football team win or lose yesterday? And are we making the same decisions as judges in identical cases? Are we paroling these people and keeping these other people in jail?”

Noise is a huge part of how we make decisions. It’s rare for me to find someone who has sat down and made a list of their best decisions and the components of those decisions, and done a noise audit. And I think this is why there’s a big move to teach game theory and Poker, especially to women who don’t always learn how to take risks. Poker, and Texas Hold ‘Em in particular, is how we’re beginning to teach people how to take risks in decision-making situations that they must take, even if they have imperfect information.

Pete Mockaitis
With noise, we’re defining that as our historical track record of decisions? How are we defining noise here?

Caroline Miller
Noise is when we have the exact same decision to make about, let’s say, a referee on a football field, right? And it’s the same player going off sides, and it’s a Sunday or a Thursday night game, and you didn’t get a lot of sleep before the Thursday night game, and you see the same player or the same play unfolding in front of you but you make a different decision. You throw a flag or you don’t throw a flag.

Noise is when you have the same kind of decision to make but you make it differently on different days because of things that are going on in your life, and that’s different from bias. Bias is when you’re biased against a certain gender or a certain class of people, or you’re biased against people who didn’t go to your school and you’re a hiring manager. That’s bias. Noise is when you’re allowing the variables—usually you don’t know this is happening—to interfere with decision-making so that your decisions are uneven.

And what’s interesting is artificial intelligence is proving to be one of the greatest ways to spot and fix noise problems in decision-making because it’s just taking data and making a decision on an algorithm, and that’s really what we need to strive to do. Does that help?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. So, could you just give me eight examples of noise variables?

Caroline Miller
Another example of a noise variable, I said about a hiring manager, would be, let me think, I’m going to go back to a judge, a judge who is making parole decisions. And during the course of a day, at 8 o’clock in the morning, they make a parole decision and a complicated decision where they give somebody parole instead of sending them back to jail because they had a good night’s sleep, their football team won, but maybe their willpower is a little bit higher in the morning. But they’re making a decision that they won’t always make at the end of the day from decision fatigue. That’s noise.

Pete Mockaitis
I see. So, the variables would have to do with the rest, their rested-ness is noise because it’s not actually a valid consideration in terms of what is optimal for a decision regarding that person’s fate. And so, if they’re tired, they’re hungry, they just got in a fight with somebody, it’s sort of like they’ve got an emotional thing going on.

Caroline Miller
They’re distracted, yup.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’ve also heard that we can estimate the steepness of a hill differently if there’s a friend with us or not. And so, in a way that’s noise. Friendship is noise. It’s somewhat ambiguous, but we’re assessing our prospects based on things that are not intrinsic to the situation on the ground.

Caroline Miller
I know the research you’re speaking of, that’s a little bit different than a decision. That’s a thought. That’s a thought you’re having, and you’re saying this is a more effortful climb or it’s not, based on whether you’re looking up, down, do you have a heavy backpack. I’ll give you another example of noise that I think most people can relate to is a radiologist reading mammogram screens and they look identical.

There’s very little difference between the two mammograms, but depending on the time of day, again, “Did you sleep? Did you have a good lunch? Are you distracted because you got a call from school and your child needs to be picked up?” What you might do is send somebody to come back in for a second mammogram, or say to the other person “You’re clear.” And again, I’ll just say, artificial intelligence is reading scans and removing noise from decision-making. It’s fascinating.

So that’s just another example of noise. Same screen, same X-ray, different decision, based on the noise that’s going on in your life. And what’s interesting is Kahneman said, at the end of his life, and he died in March of this year, he said, “This is a bigger problem that’s so not discussed, bigger than bias.” And we get all this bias training. Noise is a bigger problem and it potentially cost companies and countries billions of dollars.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, okay. And you said there’s a final component.

Caroline Miller
So, grit. So, I’ve worked closely with Angela Duckworth. I wrote a book called Getting Grit and I’m fascinated by the fact that we can break grit down into components like humility, and patience, and the ability to take risks, and persistence, and perseverance, the ability to stick with a task just a little bit longer.

When you have big goals, it’s baked into that idea, that fact, that you’re going to have to be more than just resilient. You’re going to have to do hard things for a long period of time. So, you have to essentially do a grit assessment on yourself, “Do I have what it takes to actually hang in there through the dark night of the soul? Do I have the people around me who will reflect back to me that I have what it takes to finish what I’m starting right now?”

Grit is a quality that can be cultivated and it can also be contagious. So, Angela Duckworth found at West Point that if you had a low grit score, because she does the grit scale on incoming cadets at West Point, because what they found is your grit score predicts whether or not you drop out that first summer, Beast Barracks, because they couldn’t figure it out.

For a hundred years, they couldn’t figure it out. Leadership scores, grades, whatever, nothing, nothing spoke to the dropout rate during Beast Barracks until the grit scale. And she found that when you room a lower grit score cadet with a higher grit score cadet, it’s contagious because you do a few things differently for longer periods of time. You might even be a mindset. I call it changing the channel. You can learn to change the channel in your brain to go to a place where you hang in there a little bit longer. So, you have to have what’s good grit, and you can build it.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, is the higher contagious to the low-grit person or vice versa?

Caroline Miller
Yes, high grit. Well, the lower grit person becomes grittier, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
The higher grit person does not become less gritty? They’re not infected by the lazy person there?

Caroline Miller
No.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Caroline Miller
Because the culture of West Point rewards grit. And that’s something that Locke and Latham also found is they found that people are less happy while they’re pursuing hard goals over a long period of time. They set, again, these challenging and specific goals and they were puzzled, “Why are you a little less happy while you’re pursuing these long-term goals but then happier at the very end?” It’s because society prizes and rewards that kind of behavior.

You want to have good grit. And I’ll quickly say, there are three kinds of bad grit that we all have to look out for. One is stupid grit. I call it stupid grit. It’s like summit fever in mountaineering where you see the top of the mountain and you’re so drunk on getting to the top, or you’re so arrogant that you don’t listen to the Sherpas and you’re not caring about the people you’re roped into. You see a lot of arrogance with stupid grit, and it’s people who think they know better and they won’t change direction. Good grit does not have that component because it has humility baked into it.

And then there’s faux grit. We have so much faux grit, you know, people pretending to do hard things, faking their PhD research, pretending they won the Medal of Honor when, in fact, they bought it on eBay. I mean, so much faux grit; performance-enhancing drugs. And then there’s selfie-grit, which is also bad, and that’s when you do hard things, but you are so obnoxious about it, because you tell everybody that you suck all the oxygen out of the room and that repels people.

So, good grit is important when you have big goals, because you will have to dig a little bit deeper and work harder to achieve them. And then excellence, people need to start at the beginning of their goal-setting strategy with “What am I attempting to hit here? What is my definition of excellence with my behavior, or with this particular outcome?” Because in goal setting, we say that which cannot be measured cannot be achieved.

You must have a measurement in place of the excellence you’re shooting for. And I’ll just remind you, Locke and Latham found that the best possible outcome was always past your fingertips, challenging and specific. Low goals and no goals got mediocre to no results whatsoever. And at the end of every day, believe it or not, we do scan our day subconsciously for what we’re proud of that we did that day. And the things that build what’s called authentic self-esteem are the things we did outside of our comfort zone in pursuit of meaningful goals.

We never build our confidence and pride on doing easy things. And this is why I believe we have really done a tremendous disservice to the generation of young adults now when we took away valedictorians and gave them comfort animals, and we dumbed down the playgrounds, and we just did a lot of things that ended up stripping elite out of their vocabularies, and they didn’t know “What does excellence look like? And how am I going to get there?”

And the minute you introduce that back in, people take more pride in what they’re doing and they change their perception of themselves, “What am I capable of doing? How did I do it? And I’m proud of myself and I also know who has my back. I know who was there for me when it was hard, and when I fell down, and when I needed to get back up.” That’s why we all need to do hard things, because it changes our lives, and I believe it changes the world. And knowing goal-setting theory makes it more possible that we can do these things.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, could you perhaps give us an example of a worst practice and a best practice approach to, let’s say, we’re tackling a goal to launch some new and improved marketing initiatives to reach record-breaking levels of revenue?

Caroline Miller
So, let’s say you’re at a company and you’re launching sweatshirts, and you’re trying to decide whether or not you’re going to have this font or that font, or this color or that color, and you just want to do a brainstorming session. So, you pull everyone in, 30 people into a conference room, and you start throwing around ideas. And at the end of the day, you’ve come up with maybe one or two good ideas, but, hey, that’s it.

And then you don’t set a target for, “Well, how quickly can we do it?” or, “Is there a better way to do this?” Remember, brainstorming, you also want to know what’s new, “Is there a better, more efficient way? How do we find out where to do that?” You don’t find out any of those things. It’s what we’ve always done before. This is the approach we’ve always used before for brainstorming.

You don’t even stop and think about relationships, “Who in this company also has to know that this is our timeline for achieving this goal? Whose support do we need?” You don’t figure out investments. You don’t even realize that the cost of the kind of material for these sweatshirts has gone up, “Oh, my gosh, your budget is blown.” Your decision-making, you’ve never figured out “What if I have to pivot? What if COVID hits? What if the whole world shuts down? Do I have a playbook for pivoting?” Probably not.

Good grit, “Oh, my gosh, I’ve never faced a situation where I didn’t succeed in this job.” So, then you maybe blame it on somebody else, and excellence is you probably never started with a target. What’s different, what to know what’s good, is when you have this goal, “Okay, I’m going to make the best possible sweatshirts with this font and this color and the rest of it.”

And then you go, “Okay, who around me, who in this world is doing it better than us? Who has set some kind of dimension of excellence that we can look to? Are they using the kind of fabric that doesn’t kind of go into the trash dumps? Is it biodegradable?” So, you study what excellence looks like. And instead of putting all the people who look like each other in the same room where you get, what I call the Habsburg-Jaw effect, where it’s sterile, there are no ideas that actually live past being in that room because they’re not interesting and they’re not diverse.

You do a very different approach where you maybe have people submit their ideas. Instead of being in a room, you want a diverse set of people brainstorming, and you figure out, “Is this a learning goal or a performance goal?” It’s probably a performance goal because you’re making – I hope this isn’t going on too long – because you’re making sweatshirts. So, you’ve done it before and you know you’ve sold 100,000 in six months at this price.

So, you say, “Hey, we’re going to do it with this new fabric, and it’s within our budget, and it’s a performance goal for us so we’re going to sell 200,000 more. And here’s how we’re going to do it because we’ve got this new factory process, we’ve got this new sweatshirt, we’ve got these people who are giving us better prices on fonts, etc.” You go into the decision-making, “What do we do if…?”

Let me give you an example on this, if you don’t mind. Abercrombie & Fitch was about to introduce what they called their best dressed guest line, and they had, just as COVID hit, they had taken pictures of all the models, they had all the clothes made, best dressed guests. It was designed to appeal to millennials who needed five outfits to go to weekend destination weddings, which was the big thing. So, suddenly COVID hits, and they’ve got this marketing line all paid for, they’ve got the budget, they’ve got the models, they’ve got the pictures, and it’s not usable because no one’s getting on a plane, no one’s going to a wedding, and no one’s buying clothes.

They pivoted quickly. They sent cameras to all their employees. They said, “Wear our lounge clothes. Take pictures of yourselves. Those are our ads for the next year and a half.” That kind of agility and that ability to pivot and do that kind of decision-making was such a plus for Abercrombie & Fitch. So, then they reintroduced best dressed guests when COVID passed, and, anyway, that ended up being a big hit too.

So, you have to know, “What’s going to happen if we have a black swan event like COVID?” And then grit, I already explained. And then excellence, you start with “This is a performance goal for us. This is what we’ve done before. What’s challenging and specific?” You name that number and then you measure along the way to make sure that you’re hitting those targets.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, let’s say it’s a learning goal that it’s new and never before done, how do we approach that differently?

Caroline Miller
Okay. So, let’s just take the Apollo spacesuits. So, there was that horrible implosion where three astronauts died in, I think, the Mercury capsule, Gus Grissom and his two colleagues, but Apollo was still going to put a man on the moon. That was their goal. So, they had to make these spacesuits that were going to withstand the kinds of pressures and fires and gases that could leak into the suit. So, what did they do?

They didn’t set an exact date and time by which they would have the suit, but they went and they found people who knew how to deal with stretchy fabric and who could sew with great precision. And what did they do? These engineers went and found these seamstresses at Playtex, the girdle company, and they met with them. And in a room of brainstorming, they honored the knowledge and the wisdom of these teenage and young 20-year-old seamstresses quite often who could sew with precision to 1/32 of an inch.

And instead of saying, “This spacesuit will be ready by September,” they said, “We’re going to get this right and we’re going to incentivize everybody here to have the standard of excellence, that this is going to keep people alive, and it’s going to allow the United States to come back with what we need to learn about the moon.”

So, all the seamstresses had pictures of the astronauts hung over their sewing machines to remind them of the importance of what they were doing. So, they baked in the motivation, and so only the definition of what excellence looked like was “Could this spacesuit allow Neil Armstrong to move and twist and maneuver and reach down and pick up lunar rocks?” It wasn’t, “We’re going to have it done by a certain date.” Excellence is, “It’s got to work and it’s got to pass these tests. And that’s when we’re going to say we have a spacesuit that’s going to go to the moon.” That’s a learning goal.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. Well, tell me, Caroline, any final do’s and don’ts that we should know about setting and achieving big goals?

Caroline Miller
I think the most important one is to assume that you know nothing. And I hate to say that, but 20 years ago when I was handed goal-setting theory at the University of Pennsylvania as one of my first assignments in this Masters of Applied Positive Psychology program, I own Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy, Tony Robbins, Stephen Covey, every single person, I had their books and I got goal-setting theory and I went home and I looked at all of them. They were all urban legends.

And yet, this is how we have built companies. This is what we’ve instilled in productivity systems. If you don’t know goal-setting theory, you don’t know how to really set goals effectively. Just start with that one assumption, dip into Big Goals, and just learn goal-setting theory in the first three chapters of the book.

Get that and then move on to the BRIDGE methodology, because if you do that, there isn’t any dream that you have that you can’t have a really good shot at achieving because you’ll be able to create a strategy that’s going to get you as close as you can possibly get to that dream or get you there. Because I really do believe that the science changes our lives and it makes us more hopeful and optimistic.

I also want to say that one of the most important things in this book is that women do not typically do as well with all the motivational kind of programs and advice that’s been doled out for 50 years. I’ll just give you an example. When women perform jobs on time and tasks on time and get things done on time, they do not get credit for it. Instead, men often, who work longer hours and who don’t get it done on time, the men get rewarded for being seen as harder working and more committed to the company.

So, it’s really important that when you pursue a goal, you have to know what’s the culture you’re working in and how is that culture going to support you in the process of pursuing and achieving your goals, and that’s just one of many examples in the book. You have to know, “Does my company and does the culture I come from and my gender support using this advice to achieve my goal? Or is it going to backfire?”

Because men tend to approach goals as winning and domination and power and success and often money, and women are more communal. They’re not as agentic. That’s not what women get acculturated and rewarded for. So, you can’t just take the goal-setting advice that’s out there on lots and lots of podcasts.

Because, quite often, we don’t hear voices other than men talking to men about men, like Special Forces and presidents and examples that are unrelatable to a lot of us who are taking in really, really interesting stories and advice, but pause and say “Does this story relate to me and my life and what I do and what I look like?” Because if it doesn’t, make sure you do the research to find somebody who does fit that. That’s going to be the advice that’s going to help you the most.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. Now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Caroline Miller
My favorite quote is, “You can’t keep what you don’t give away.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Caroline Miller
My favorite study is the “Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect” by Sonja Lyubomirsky, Laura King, and Ed Diener. And they found, at the same time, 2005, as I went back to school, that all success in life is preceded by being happy first. So, any goal strategy plan has to start with how you boot up your well-being through positive interventions, like using your strengths, exercise, gratitude, meditation. So, all success in life is preceded by being happy first, so you got to start there.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Caroline Miller
Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman by Phyllis Chessler.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Caroline Miller
I love Perplexity.

Pete Mockaitis
I just started using that. Why do you love it?

Caroline Miller
Because it gives you the sources and citations where it’s getting information from, instead of just kind of being a wild scrape of the internet. And I’ll just say this, I just spent last weekend at Penn with the co-creator of the Google Notebook, which just got rave reviews everywhere. Google Notebook, Steven Johnson is the man I was with at Penn last weekend. He has come up with something extraordinary where you can drag all your sources and websites and links and podcasts and whatever into this one notebook and, oh, my God, you have your own brain.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Caroline Miller
Favorite habit is swimming. I get up at five o’clock and I go to swim practice with other master swimmers.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Caroline Miller
“You can’t keep what you don’t give away.” And can I give you the backstory on that, because it’s very meaningful to me?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Caroline Miller
Real quickly. When I was overcoming bulimia almost 40 years ago, at a time when nobody got better, it was really a death sentence. I started to get better one day at a time in a 12-step group in Baltimore, Maryland, and it was just a miracle. I didn’t think I was going to. I’m surprised I’m alive some days. And I was so thrilled and proud and happy that I was eating and healthy and just not doing all the destructive things I’ve been doing for seven or eight years before.

And someone said to me, “Caroline, it’s great that you’re in recovery, but you can’t keep what you don’t give away.” That taught me what gratitude and love and giving is all about. If you have something worth sharing that’s good, that will help somebody else, you can’t keep it unless you turn around and pull someone with you. So, people quote that back to me all the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Caroline Miller
My website, CarolineMiller.com, or the book Big Goals has its own website. We just loaded lots of case studies on success and failure using the BRIDGE methodology and goal-setting theory and that’s BigGoalsBook.com.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Caroline Miller
I would say choose to do hard things and choose to learn about yourself and your character strengths in the process of doing hard things. And if I have a bonus asterisk point, go to something I have no vested interest in, I don’t get anything for this, the VIA’s Character Strengths Survey. It’s free, 15 minutes, at ViaStrengths.org. And, boy, it ranks your character strengths from 1 to 24. Lock onto your top 5, and use them every day in new and creative ways to show up and succeed. It’s proven and it makes you happier to just find out what your top five are.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Caroline, thank you. This is fun. I wish you much luck with all your big goals.

Caroline Miller
Oh, you, too. Thank you so much.